Music and chance

Mention music and chance and John Cage comes to mind. But there are some other interesting examples of music and chance. If, like me, you arrange your CDs (or LPs even) in alphabetical order you will have experienced another example of music and chance. Why do so many composers' surnames begin with the letter B? Only last week my heart sunk when I ordered a CD by another composer involved with music and chance, Gavin Bryars' Oi Me Lasso. How would I find space on the shelf for the CD when it arrived?

This week brings yet another example of music and chance. Why do so many composer anniversaries fall within a few days? Tomorrow, November 22, is the big one. But yesterday I marked the death of Wilhelm Stenhammar, and today, among other anniversaries, we note the deaths of Henry Purcell (1695), Frank Martin (1974) and Robert Simpson ( 1997).

Henry Purcell should need no introduction; although the anniversary of his death falling the day before Benjamin Britten's birthday is another fascinating example of music and chance. Perhaps chance also dictated that Robert Simpson was born at the wrong time? The last of his eleven symphonies was composed in 1990, and takes the soundworld of his beloved Nielsen and Bruckner into the late-twentieth century. His music found little favour with BBC programmers of the time. Some may have judged his music to be written too late, but time has shown his thinking was well ahead of its time. Robert Simpson resigned from the BBC in 1980 because, and I quote, he could 'no longer work for an institution whose views he no longer respected'. More on an under-rated composer and thinker here.

Chance dictated that Frank Martin was born in Switzerland in 1890. Frank Martin's musical language, like the culture of Switzerland, steers a middle course. He assimilated elements of serialism into his own unique musical language, but retained firm links with tonality. Martin is remembered today mainly as a choral composer, and his magnificent Mass for double choir is probably his most enduring work. But there is also fine orchestral music, including a Violin Concerto and Passacaglia for String Orchestra. A recommended budget priced Decca double CD contains five of his orchestral works plus the oratorio In terra pax.

For some reason chance has meant that a late masterpiece by Frank Martin remains unknown. His Requiem for choir, soloists, organ, harpsichord and oboe d'amore was completed in 1972. It sets the Latin Mass using a finely honed and mature version of his unique musical language. Although concert performances are rarer than the proverbial hen's teeth there is a CD available. It is on the Musikszene Schwieitz label, and is difficult to get hold of. But if you find a copy you will realise that chance is a fine thing.

More chance when the audience composes the music.
Image credit CindyKroth. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

BBC launches time travel technology

The photo above was taken at Masaaki Suzuki's wonderful Aldeburgh Festival recital in Framlingham Church yesterday morning. He played Jean Adam Guillaume Guilain, William Byrd, Henry Purcell and J.S. Bach on the Tamar organ seen here, which dates from 1674.

The BBC recorded the recital, and their microphone array, with four crossed transducers, can be seen to the right of the organ. I have written here about the much-hyped BBC iPlayer. This may not yet be launched, but it certainly promises some mind-boggling time shift possibilities. Masaaki Suzuki's recital took place on 21 June, here is the note from the Aldeburgh Festival programme booklet:

This performance is being recorded by BBC Radio 3 for broadcast on Lunchtime Concert on 11 June.

Now, for more time travel, follow a path which leads from Framlingham Church to Glenn Gould.
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A brand new sexy audience ...

Between January and June 2006, a series of ‘classical music club nights’ took place in London’s fashionable Shoreditch. This monthly ‘club’ night went by the unfortunate handle of TI4U, which when translated out of its yoof txt spk unravels as This Isn’t For You – a moniker that exemplifies classical music’s traditional warm welcome to we thicko neophytes. Presumably, like everything else in Shoreditch, the name was supposed to be ironic, but then who knows? Classical music being elitist? There’s always a first time for everything.

I went along to one of these evenings with my friend Paul, although I honestly now can’t remember why we went at all. The whole idea of a classical music nightclub seemed bizarre to us; we had no idea what to expect - would TI4U be down in some dark and dingy underground club space, with a huge speaker system, dry ice and coke-queuing in the lavs? Light show? Lasers? Comin’ on like an augmented G-minor seventh sense? Or was this whole ‘club night’ thing merely canny marketing spin – an attempt to attract those who wouldn’t be seen dead in a traditional concert hall but were now in their mid-to-late 30s and worried that perhaps they soon oughtn’t really to be seen in a normal club any more either? Was this a pointer towards the future, or another cynical sign of the times? Would the prospect of a bar that remains open during the live performances (oooh!) and an invitation to ‘dress down’ for the evening succeed in pulling in the relatively young punters? Of course not! But still. It was a brave idea anyway.

Paul and I arrived on the steps of Shoreditch Town Hall neither mashed to the gills on hallucinogens nor decked out in Paul’s usual clubbing garb of rubber bondage gear and nipple clamps; rather we had arrived dressed club-soberly, as if for, say, Aphex Twin’s funeral. And Shoreditch Town Hall turned out to be a rather elegant bona fide town hall and not a heaving, scabrous underground pit, so that was that one cleaned up too. So far: as ditchwater. We entered the town hall and went through to the main, erm, hall bit, which was a large, brightly-lit wooden-floored you know, hall-type thing, with a table up one end with wine and beer on, upon whose wares we began to intoxicate ourselves in order to be in an inspirational frame of mind for the music. Up at the other end of the hall was the DJ - a mousey young lady sitting on a chair by a pair of CD decks with mounted speakers on either side. This was, wonderfully, ‘DJ Eleanor’.

Drinks in hand, Paul and I went over to watch DJ Eleanor spin her blazing wheels of burnished pewter. She was wearing a nice Laura Ashley dress and selected classical CDs to play from out of a faux-leatherbound folder. There were no shout-outs or anything, just nervous-looking Eleanor putting on some Purcell, and then some Schubert, and then some Byrd, and then a risqué soupcon of Webern. None of these were ‘mashed-up’ either. It was so sweet. A few people stood around the edge of the hall, looking awkward in suits with their ties self-consciously removed, like a hall full of perspiring, Becks-clasping David Camerons. There was also the occasional rakish chap in devil-may-care leather jacket. Less Brando, more Lovejoy.

Then the live music started, and it was like a ‘flash mob’, I think, ish, in that the chamber musicians just set up anywhere on the floor of the hall and started to play, willy-nilly. The punters self-consciously gathered around. It was pleasant enough. When they had finished, we dispersed back to the bar and the walls and DJ Eleanor went back to work, smiling shyly. It went on like this for a few hours, until a lone cellist came out and played some Bach and everything changed.

I find that Bach, especially his six solo cello suites, always manages to evoke a general fatalistic resignation to everything. Not just to one’s boring old lot – thought that does come into it – but everything else you can think of too: the sun the stars, the clouds, the Earth, air, trees, toy dogs, traffic wardens and so on, plus, most importantly, one’s own place in the Greater Context (utter and fundamental meaninglessness). This was like a kind of mass hypnosis; a shared consciousness-raising (or lowering, depending on how one’s dealing with the meaninglessness) experience for all within earshot.

You could just tell, by glancing around, that everybody was on the same trip. Was it just the algebra? Bach’s music is famously mathematically rigorous – are such collective ‘trances’ simply a subconscious reaction to the logic that’s underpinning the notes we can hear? Or are there deeper forces at work? Was Bach simply a genius who was able to thread into his music, even 250+ years down the line, specific and innate elements of profound transcendence? I suspect the answer is a little bit of both and a bottle of beer. Or however many we had. Fourteen or so. Plus the ketamine.

Would I go again? Yes, were we not now banned. And especially if they focused more on the ‘challenging’ 20th century stuff (Cage, Xenakis, Schoenberg, more Webern et al) rather than the same old Baroque (Bach excepted) and Romantic chamber music standards. But this is just personal preference. I’d also kind of prefer it if they raised DJ Eleanor’s volume at least double, turned the lights down by half, and actually banned people wearing suits from attending. I mean, if you’re serious about attracting a non-traditional audience, at least encourage the traditional audience who you can’t really stop from attending to pretend to be otherwise. If not, you’re just prolonging the status quo, Shoreditch or no Shoreditch.

It says on their website that TI4U will ‘have a new home’ from June 2007. If these dudes are truly looking to bring classical music to the attention of a brand new, sexy audience (without dumbing down to Katherine Jenkins levels of hatefulness), they need to take this underground somehow – make it weirder and darken its hues. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always Stringfellows. OK that’s the end now.

Seb Hunter writes in Issue 6 - Clubbing of his Bitterest Pill ezine, subscribe for free here.

For the back story read Rock me Amadeus
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Elgar - the first of the new

Elgar was the first of the new. Since Purcell, England had not produced a composer for the European common market. Against -much against- the background of academicians who were destined to remain dilettanti, there emerged a self-taught amateur destined to become a master.

At the time of Elgar's birth Brahms was 24, Dvorák was 16, and Wagner 44. When he died, Vaughan Williams was 62, Walton was 32, Britten was 20 and Schoenberg 60. Elgar's musical fathers were far away; many, almost all of them were of the Austo-German tradition, with Brahms, rather than Wagner, as the most powerful influence; and none of them English.

In a penetrating article in the current issue of Music and Letters Donald Mitchell goes so far as to submit 'that to find Elgar today specifically English in flavour is to expose oneself as the victim of a type of collective hallucination.' Elgar's early success on the Continent, and with Continentals, was indeed striking. It needed a Continental - Hans Richter - to introduce the Enigma Variations, The Dream of Gerontius and the first Symphony (dedicated to him) to English audiences, and Düsseldorf heard Gerontius before London.

Hans Keller writes in Music and Musicians in June 1957, and contradicts the currently fashionable view that Elgar was not appreciated outside England.

Now playing ...

The Dream of Gerontius conducted by Benjamin Britten. The decision of the 'East Anglican' Britten (left) to record Elgar's Gerontius, with its hardline Catholic text by Cardinal Newman, was a surprising one. As a young music student Britten recorded in his diary in February 1931 that he listened on the radio to '1 minute of Elgar Symphony 2 but can stand no more,' and a few months later he condemned the Enigma Variations for their 'sonorous orchestration' which 'cloys very soon'. But in his sleeve note for the original LP release the composer William Alwyn described Newman's text as a 'Passion Play', and this may have appealed to Britten the composer of church parables.

Britten conducted an Aldeburgh Festival performance of Gerontius on June 9 1971, and the recording was made in the same month in Snape Maltings. William Mann described the concert performance as 'urgent, unsentimental and totally lacking in bombast', and Alan Blyth described the original LP release as 'a searing re-creation of the drama that I find at all times involving and convincing...Britten removes the veneer of sentimentality, even sanctimoniousness, that has for long come between us and Elgar's compulsive vision.'

The 1971 recording made by Decca, with the 'dream' cast including Peter Pears (left) and the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, is one of the classics of the gramophone. In the section that leads up to the life affirming chorus Praise to the Holiest in the height Britten shows his masterly control of the large forces, and the pre-digital sound is outstanding both for the lower registers and the three dimensional sound-stage captured by the Decca recording team. Elgar was a master composer, and Britten a master musician, this Dream of Gerontius is now back in the catalogue, buy it before it is again deleted.

Inclusiveness is out of fashion in classical music today, which means if contemporary music is your scene late-romantics like Elgar are the musical equivalent of dead meat. Next month we will be at Yoshi Oida's new production of Death in Venice in Snape Maltings. We should all remember that Britten recorded Elgar's great late-romantic masterpiece, Gerontius, in July 1971 in Snape Maltings while he was composing one of the great twentieth-century operas, Death in Venice, for performance in the same venue.

I started by quoting Hans Keller's view that Elgar was 'the first of the new'. We should also remember that Keller (left) championed Britten's music from the 1940s when it was still viewed as 'new' by the establishment. He was joint author of a Britten symposium in 1952, and the composer's 1975 String Quartet No. 3, with its last movement quote from Death in Venice, is inscribed to him. Britten died on December 7 1976, and his String Quartet No. 3 was given its first performance by the Amadeus Quartet two weeks later in Snape Maltings.

Benjamin Britten and Hans Keller recognised the greatness of Elgar's music. They also recognised the importance of inclusiveness, and embraced composers from Purcell to their twentieth-century contemporaries. Two very important messages as the 150th of Elgar's birth on Saturday June 2 approaches.

The music of Britain, and Britten ...

Hans Keller's headline, the first of the new, is a wordplay on the title of a patriotic 1942 film that Elgar would have approved of. The First of the Few was a biography of R.J. Mitchell (left), the designer of the Supermarine Spitfire (the film was renamed Spitfire for US release). The title comes from Winston Churchill who used these words to describe the Battle of Britain aircrews: "Never in the face of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few." And this overgrown path leads us to another great twentieth-century English composer; the soundtrack of The First of the Few, including the famous Spitfire Prelude and Fugue, was written by William Walton.

Contemporary music was as bitchy in the early twentieth-century as it is today. Elgar was not a fan of Walton's music, and said about Walton's Viola Concerto that the composer had murdered the poor unfortunate instrument. Elgar and Walton only met once, according to Lady Walton it was in the lavatory at a Worcester Three Choirs Festival concert. After the Second World War Walton fell out with Britten and Pears, and supposedly said that the all-male Billy Budd should be retitled The Bugger’s Opera or Twilight of the Sods (original production shot above).

Another late-twentieth-century composer who was a surprising champion of Elgar was Michael Tippett whose overseas concerts often included Elgar's music. In his autobiography (Hutchinson ISBN 009175307) Tippett describes a "stunning" Enigma Variations in Brussels with him conducting his beloved Leicester School Symphony Orchestra, and tells how 'afterwards a Belgian composer came to me and said, "What an extraordinary work - more interesting than Brahms' St Anthony Variations!"', and Tippett describes another Enigma played by the Saint Louis Symphony in 1968 under his baton as "one of the best performances (of the work) in the USA I guess". Tippett (left) was inclusiveness personified and embraced everything from Tallis (he made the first-ever recording of Spem in alium in 1948) through Elgar to the blues. But he also shared some of Walton's reservations about Billy Budd. Tippett stayed at Britten's house in Aldeburgh while the opera was being composed and told the story of 'a marvellous remark in the libretto - I think it got changed - when they were going to clear the decks in order to let off the gun, and the wonderful order, given by Claggart or somebody, "Clear the decks of seamen" I roared with laughter!'

Walton may have been irreverent about Billy Budd, but when the chips were down he came to Britten's aid. In 1942, the same year as The First of the Few was made, Walton appeared as a supporting witness at Britten's successful appeal for registration as a Conscientous Objectors. Britten's pacifism, like Tippett's, was controversial, but if his appeal had failed Britten could well have joined young composers such as Ivor Gurney and George Butterworth whose careers had been cut short by the previous World War, and who were lamented in the elegiac 1919 Cello Concerto of Edward Elgar. Which is where this path started.

For more on Elgar read the excruciating boredom of pure fact.
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Opera's other ring

Opera at the big houses is a circus with acts that include £10million donations, vanity productions and shuffle maestros. My photo above was taken last night at an opera as far away from £170 ticket prices as you can get, but it was still a circus.

Great Yarmouth Hippodrome is one of the oldest surviving circus buildings in Europe still used for circus performances. The survival of the remarkable building, which dates from 1904, is almost certainly due to the circular arena, or ring, which very unusually doesn't have a stage. This meant it was unsuitable for conversion into a theatre or cinema, and the structure has survived for more than a century virtually unchanged, although the original audience capacity of three thousand has been reduced to today's Health and Safety friendly nine hudred.

The historic photo below, showing the interior, is the first of two kindly supplied by the current owner Peter Jay, and was taken soon after the Hippodrome was opened. One of the remarkable features of the building is the water feature created when the floor of the circus ring sinks and is flooded with 60,000 gallons of water. The feature is still in regular use, but not for last night's opera!


When the Hippodrome was opened Great Yarmouth was a fashionable seaside resort, and the second historic photo below shows the circus building in its heyday. In the hundred years since then the town's fortunes have declined, with the collapse of both the tourist industry and commercial fishing leaving the area economically blighted, a stark contrast to fashionable Aldeburgh which is just 25 miles to the south.

Today Yarmouth is a bleak place dominated by amusement arcades, fast-food joints, and cheap hotels for migrant workers. The Hippodrome's front lot has been sold as a slot arcade, but, by a miracle, the building remains intact behind it, and is still a working circus due to the heroic efforts of former rock star Peter Jay who now owns and actively manages it (does anyone out there remember Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers?). For details of circus performances follow this link.


Norfolk and Norwich Festival took the inspired decision to bring opera to the Hippodrome in 2007 for the first time ever, with Armonico Consort Touring Opera bringing their much praised production of Purcell's Fairy Queen for just one night. Bringing an innovative production to a new venue in a town that never sees live opera is what music festivals are all about. This adventurous approach simply underlines how the BBC, and other corporations, have hijacked the word 'festival' to give credibility to events such as the BBC Proms that are now little more than cynical exercises in massmarket entertainment and commercialism.

Purcell's Fairy Queen is a musical fantasy (or 'semi-opera') based on the ideas and characters in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Designer Thomas Guthrie took his inspiration for the Armonico Consort production from the 19th century painter of Shakespearian fantasies Richard Dadd. The artist established a reputation in that extraordinary genre, the Victorian fairy painting. But he changed career direction when he was committed to a mental institution in 1843 after killing his father. In echoes of Vincent Van Gogh, an enlightened doctor in Bedlam encouraged Dadd to paint without commercial constraints , and the results inspired last night's production which, as my photos show, was set in an old-style mental hospital.


The production used comedy, music, song, dance, puppetry and circus skill, but was also musically completely authentic and extremely well sung. What an evening! - live music-making of the highest order, imaginative staging that gave real meaning to those tired words 'music theatre', an inspired choice of venue, and a vision from the Norfolk and Norwich Festival that redefined inclusiveness. But above all an evening that challenged our preconceptions of what opera is, what a music festival is, and even what we are. Here are director Thomas Guthrie's wise words:

For me both Dadd and Fairy Queen represent the need for marriage within us all, whether we are actually 'married' at all, or even inclined to it. The marriage in the Fairy Queen is a union not between characters we have come to know and feel for, as it is in Midsummer Night's Dream, but at a deeper level a marriage of mind and heart, of heaven and earth, fairy and mortal, lost and found, inward feeling and the outward expression of that feeling. It concerns us all because we are in a relationship with ourselves as well as with the world around us. A marriage that none of us can escape.


Now read about how another artist was encouraged to paint by an enlightened doctor
Three production photos taken by Pliable at Hippodrome performance on May 9 2007 using available light with Casio EX-Z120 digital camera. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk